Unfurling her astonishingly long limbs as she settles into a sofa at Uptown lounge Fez, German chanteuse Ute Lemper seems to be channeling every 1920s and ’30s siren to ever grace the silver screen.

“Anybody can look like [Greta] Garbo with the right light,” she says modestly.

That’s debatable. But it’s true that few can evoke the era’s zeitgeist as well as Lemper, who appears Friday at Town Hall.

She does so with authentic interpretations of ballads made famous by Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf, as well as performing classic works of Kurt Weill and cabaret material from the Weimar Republic.

Still, the 36-year-old singer — who settled on the Upper West Side with her husband and two young children after moving here in 1998 to take over from Bebe Neuwirth in Broadway’s “Chicago” — refuses to be shackled to the past.

At Town Hall, Lemper will showcase her new album, “Punishing Kiss,” an ambitious avant-pop project with songs by Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, Philip Glass and The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon, who have written tunes tailored to suit her flair for the dramatic.

“I think it was time for me, after 15 years of singing material in its authentic original way, to move on and explore more contemporary areas,” she says.

Each song is a mini-drama, complete with character development and plot, and is therefore “very faithful to my style of performance,” Lemper says.

After releasing “All That Jazz: the Best of Ute Lemper” last year, she toyed with the idea of recording an album of modernized Kurt Weill to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth this year.

Instead, a friend urged her to “go all the way” and do an album of original contemporary songs. So Lemper approached Cave, Costello, Waits, et al, and had no trouble convincing them to “get in the boat.”

“I’m a fan of all these guys — their music is what I listen to at home,” she says. “It’s really a great honor that they were familiar with what I did and were inspired to write songs for me.”

The work of these modern pop purveyors turned out to be not so different from Lemper’s vintage material.

“We’re all telling stories about outcasts, losers, lost souls, survivors, non-conformists — deeply passionate people living on the amoral edge of society.”